A Waste of Shame

by Jim Lusby

Genres: Thrillers

Synopsis

On the first day of the new Millennium the body of a 97-year-old woman is found strangled and mutilated in her ramshackle house in a remote seaside village in west Cork. The local police are inclined to pin it on a pair of travellers who have set up camp in the neighbourhood, after drug money. McCadden, still new in his job on the all-Ireland murder squad, is not so sure. The viciousness of the attack seems to suggest something much deeper. What has this woman done in her 97 years to inspire such rage? The answer goes back almost to the beginning of the twentieth century.

Release date: October 13, 2011

Publisher: Orion Publishing Group

Print pages: 304

Sample

 

It was still dark when the boy was woken. Just eighteen minutes past five according to his Adidas Chrono watch, which he’d synchronized with the speaking clock the night before and which he’d checked again for accuracy a little after midnight. Because it had been a last present from his dying father, he relied on the watch as one of the few sources of certainty in his life. He thought of it as his guide. In a world where almost everything else had become treacherously unreliable, he trusted it as a talisman.

When he found himself sitting upright in his bed, screaming wildly and drenched with his own sweat, he knew that no one would come to calm or comfort him. He sensed immediately that he was alone again in the cottage. The previous night, on New Year’s Eve, his mother had left at ten o’clock with Michael Slade, the man who took her out at weekends, every Friday and Saturday night. She never stayed at home those nights. Not even when the boy was sick. She hadn’t believed him when he’d told her about the limping man with the No. 1 haircut who was hanging around the village harbour one night before Christmas, accusing him of inventing scares and trying to blackmail her. Last night, she’d said they were going to join a house party in a nearby town, about twelve kilometres north of the village, and she’d promised to return by one, if only to check that he was sleeping. But he hadn’t believed her. She had no transport of her own. No one would want to drag themselves away from the party to drive her back to the village. And besides, she wouldn’t ask them to. When she was with Michael Slade, she always forgot about the boy.

On the small screen in his darkened bedroom, he’d watched the television coverage of the New Year celebrations. But he had no interest in the pleasures of strangers. His attention was driven by terror. For almost a year his mind had been darkened by prophecies of disaster on this day, of blood-soaked accidents and gory chaos, as the western world lurched from one millennium to another, slipping its tenuous hold on its own technology. This was why he’d obsessively checked the accuracy of his wristwatch after midnight. And this was why he’d left the warmth of his bed a minute later and stood shivering on the damp flagstones in the kitchen, testing the cooker and the fridge, the microwave and the VCR.

In the end, as at the close of so many other nights, it was disappointment that finally exhausted him. Nothing happened. None of the appliances in the cottage refused his instructions. No aircraft fell to the earth from the skies outside. No stock markets around the world were sent dizzily crashing. And his mother didn’t come home.

At one-thirty-six, propped up by sponge pillows in front of the still flickering television, the boy had fallen asleep.

He didn’t ask what woke him so savagely almost four hours later. Nightmares were too frequent an experience for him. Shivering violently as the sweat cooled on his skin, he quickly switched off the television and slipped from the bed. But killing the light so suddenly was a mistake. In the darkness, as he groped towards his mother’s bedroom, he stumbled against his own furniture, painfully stubbing his toes. He cursed but didn’t call out, because he hated the sound of his own unanswered voice echoing through the empty cottage. And because he was so drained of hope that even his instincts were stunted.

As he’d expected, his mother’s bedroom was still empty. The bed, unmade since it had been abandoned the previous morning, was cold, and untidy, and uninviting. The boy sat on its edge, his body slumped forward, exhausted, but too terrified of dreams to give in easily to sleep again. In that position, fighting to keep his eyes open, he heard what might have been a woman’s scream in the distance, cutting through the stillness of the night. He paid no attention to it. He knew that the dark was full of strange, distorted sounds and that most of them came from inside his own head.

By morning, waking at the foot of his mother’s bed, the boy had forgotten about the scream. He felt cold. The untidy covers had kept falling away from him through the night and the disrupted pattern of his sleep had left him dull and slightly disorientated. He had no appetite. He drank a carton of orange juice, because his mouth was dry and sore, and then he dressed, pulling on the same tracksuit and rain jacket he’d been wearing the last few days. The morning was damp. Through the kitchen window he could see that a heavy mist had come in off the sea. But he needed to escape the deadness of the cottage, although he knew that he’d find nothing livelier or warmer beyond it.

He had no friends to call on any more. One by one, the other kids had vanished from the area over the last few years, migrating to the cities with their parents, until he was the only child still living in the village and there was no one left to play with. Some of the abandoned houses had been sold to foreigners, who used them as holiday homes. But most of them were still unoccupied.

It wasn’t so lonely during school term. The school bus collected him early in the morning and dropped him home in the late afternoon after a crowded day. But he dreaded the rest of the year. Sometimes, at the weekends or during holidays, he still climbed the garden walls of the empty houses and sat alone in the long wet grass, spearing ants or woodlice with a penknife and bitterly remembering the games he’d once shared in.

He couldn’t understand why they didn’t leave as well. There was nothing to keep them in the village. No friends for him. No social life for his mother. Not even a shop to buy their groceries. He knew that his mother was an artist and needed seclusion for her work, but it was unfair to make him a freak as well. They should live where there were other people. And football pitches. And cinemas. And shopping centres.

The boy hated the dying village.

It had only three streets, for instance, a total he found intensely embarrassing whenever he was asked to describe where he lived. Pier Road ended at the reconstructed harbour to the west and Beach Road, running parallel to it, gradually disappeared into the sand to the east. When the tide was out, it was possible to walk from one street to the other along the stony beach. Otherwise the only link between them was Main Street, a curved and narrow strip that dropped suddenly down from a third-class road to the north and then hurried back up there again. Long ago, the boy had noticed that if the village was drawn as a street map, it looked like the mathematical symbol for pi. Now it struck him as stupid that a place that kept shrinking all the time should be represented by a constant.

There were fifty-two houses in the village: thirteen on Pier Road, eleven on Beach Road and twenty-eight along Main Street. The boy knew this because he counted them every day, always adding some extra details to his store of knowledge about the buildings and noting any further deterioration in their appearance. Thirty-three of the houses were vacant. Ten had been bought as holiday homes by outsiders, mostly by German and Dutch families who sailed their yachts into the harbour every summer and hung around for a few short weeks before going home again. Sometimes they came for Christmas and the New Year too. But not this year. All the foreigners had stayed in their own countries for the millennium.

The rest of the village’s houses were owned by locals. The boy himself lived with his mother in the last cottage to the east of Main Street. At the opposite side of the village, a strange and angry man named Carthy lived by himself. Two childless old couples were on Pier Road and another couple, with grown-up children who had left, were on Beach Road. Back on Main Street, on either side of the boarded-up post office, three of the houses were occupied by single men who worked at the local creamery. And finally, in no. 9, right in the centre of the street, there was the old woman who was said to be a witch, but whose only friend, apart from the boy’s mother, was a nervous young priest with sweaty hands and sticky sweets.

When he stepped outside his home that New Year’s morning and casually looked west, along the length of Main Street, the first thing the boy noticed was that there was no smoke coming through the open front door of the old woman’s house. This was a sign that he had often been warned by his mother to look out for. The old woman burned turf and wood in her grate. Because her chimney was blocked, the heavy smoke came back down the flue and into her front room again. Regardless of the weather or the time of day, she always left the street door open, simply to avoid suffocating herself. The yellow smoke, billowing into Main Street, was a constant reassurance that she was active. Its absence threatened an emergency.

The boy knew that he had to go and investigate, but although he didn’t like to admit it, he was still frightened of the old woman. When he was younger and had actually believed that she was a witch, her shrivelled face and cackling laugh had haunted all his dreams and nightmares. He realized now that these were only fairy tales, of course. But he still found her scary. He felt a cold shiver down his spine whenever she looked at him. Her milky, bloodshot eyes and her humped back, as if she was carrying a rucksack under her black dress, still disturbed him.

The boy crossed the road and walked slowly along the narrow footpath, past the junction with Beach Road, until he was standing directly opposite the old woman’s house. The buildings on either side had all been abandoned and neglected for more than a year, but hers was still the shabbiest in the row. The plaster had crumbled from the outside walls, exposing the brickwork underneath. The door and window frames were badly rotted. The few surviving gutters were choked with weeds and litter, and the roof, pock-marked with gaping holes and broken slates, sagged inwards where a joist had weakened in the centre.

In five minutes, the boy decided, if his mother didn’t come home from the party, if no one else woke up in the village and if he hadn’t caught sight of the old woman through the open door, he’d cross the road again and look into the old woman’s house. He set the timer on his wristwatch. Knowing that time moved slower if it was watched, he stared at the display as it counted off the seconds. His nervousness tempted him to cheat, first by changing the rules and then by imagining movement in the crumbling house, but he resisted both. When the wristwatch bleeped at him, telling him that his wait was over, he took a deep breath and jumped from the footpath.

There was no electric bell or metal knocker on the old woman’s rotting front door. The boy picked a wet stone from the street and used it to hammer loudly on the wood, remembering that the old woman was almost completely deaf. When he called out afterwards, he tried to get the same power into his voice as well. But his throat was dry from nervousness. And at the last moment, it occurred to him that he didn’t even know the old woman’s name.

His summons came out as a limp squeak. ‘Hello?’

And it wasn’t answered.

The boy stepped warily inside. He took only a single step, but he felt immediately as if he’d entered a different world. The house was in darkness. The only sound was that of water dripping steadily. Cold and damp and heavy with the sense of some hidden danger, the place had the eerie stillness of an isolated cave.

Too frozen by fear to call out loud again, the boy stood rigidly inside the draughty doorway, waiting for his eyes to adapt to the darkness.

The scene only gradually became clear to him.

There was no carpet or linoleum under his feet, just a bare concrete floor, covered with dust and strips of dirty paper and small stones. In front of him, over to his right, an open grate held powdery grey ash from the fire the old woman had kept. But there were no embers and the flames had obviously died a long time before. There must have been an attractive fireplace here once. A few of the coloured tiles and bits of the wooden surround were still in place. But nothing else had survived and now the grate was really just a blackened hole in the chimney breast. On the sloping mantelpiece above it there was an open greeting card, unsigned, but carrying a message printed in large black type. WELCOME TO THE NEW MILLENNIUM, it read. Beyond the grate, in a shallow alcove, there was a ragged cardboard box, holding a few sods of dried turf, some wooden logs and a worn, old-fashioned poker.

Close to this tattered cardboard box, the old woman was lying on the floor. She seemed to have slipped or fallen, possibly from the stained floral armchair that was pulled up to the fire. Her tiny feet, their toes pointing towards the boy, were covered with layers of black and grey woollen socks, but had no shoes. The heavy black dress she had on, entangled in an old-fashioned knitted shawl, was stained and badly torn. Above it, the boy thought at first that she was wearing a red blouse or vest and that a red necklace hung around her scrawny neck. But as he shifted sideways to allow more light from the street behind, as he noticed that the old woman’s face was heavily bruised and that detached clumps of her thin white hair were snagged under a leg of the armchair, he realized that he was mistaken about this. The old woman was actually naked from the waist upwards. What was biting into her shrivelled flesh wasn’t a beaded necklace, but a knotted cord that had been used to strangle her. And the colour on her frail chest and shoulders didn’t come from dyed material. It came from her own blood.

For a long time, unable either to step forward and confirm that the old woman was dead or to turn away and run for help, the boy stood shivering inside the open doorway, trying to locate the source of the blood. It was only when he succeeded in doing this, two or three minutes later, that he finally screamed and fled from the house. To the left of the corpse, beside a faded milk carton where two wet rats were scurrying, a section of the old woman’s right breast, nipple upwards, was lying on the dirty floor.

By the morning of 3 January, when he was ordered to travel south and join the local investigating team, McCadden had been kicking his heels in Dublin for almost two months, waiting for confirmation of his new posting. For all his eagerness for change and his fear of settling for routine, it seemed as if he’d left the familiar comforts of his job in Waterford at the wrong moment. Savage political wrangling had held up the launch of the new national homicide squad he’d been assigned to. Hastily proposed by the Minister for Justice in response to a public outcry about the level of unsolved murders in the state and cautiously backed by the Garda commissioner, the squad was now the victim of second thoughts and revised priorities. Four months on from the initial announcement, it still had no official status, no formal title, no resources and no leader. In his worst moments, woken at night by the pain from his wounded shoulder and drifting restlessly around the gloomy basement flat he was renting in Dublin, McCadden was convinced that the entire unit consisted only of himself. Detective Inspector Robinson Crusoe, he mocked himself. Another victim of Irish fondness for confusing talk with achievement.

He had no enthusiasm for the investigation into the brutal murder of an old woman in a remote southern village. He was a stranger to the area, the case was already three days old, and he was uncertain about the nature of his role. Possibly, he thought, this was just a temporary assignment to keep him busy on the sidelines. He accepted that his idleness was making him a nuisance in Dublin. Possibly, he was expected merely to go through the motions and kill some time. But he suspected another, more devious agenda. The village was in West Cork, part of the division controlled by one of the commissioner’s most bitter internal enemies, Chief Superintendent Pat Foran. After recent successes against local drug barons, Foran’s reputation was at its height. By contrast, the commissioner was under pressure. His aggressive crackdown on organized crime in the capital had brought him rapid promotion at a young age; but in the highest office, as so often happens with the talented, his virtues had suddenly become embarrassments. His personal profile was far too high for the comfort of his minister’s ego. And his fierce belief in the justness of what he was doing had left him open to accusations of arrogance and unaccountability. As the commissioner’s man, McCadden was entering hostile territory and risked being treated as a spy.

To avoid being confronted by the entire investigating team in an unfamiliar incident room, he’d arranged to be met by a single officer at the scene at two o’clock that afternoon. But his heart wasn’t in the journey. On the country roads past Cork city he contrived to get lost and had to stop on several occasions to check directions. He was an hour late when he finally reached the village. Following the instructions he’d received by email, he turned right immediately after passing the road sign at the entrance to the village. He half expected his contact to have left, but as soon as he cleared the junction he saw that a yellow Volkswagen Golf was parked at the end of the pier, facing the rough grey sea. The driver was resting against its bonnet, looking out at the choppy water. The man’s shoulders were hunched against the cold and his hands were stuffed into the pockets of the green ski jacket he was wearing. Smoke from the smouldering cigarette in his right hand was being blown behind him by the wind.

It was only when the man turned, pushing himself away from the Volkswagen and flicking his cigarette into the harbour as he heard a car approaching, that McCadden realized that the waiting officer was a young black. He had no time to conceal his surprise. As he braked, the other was already passing quickly in front of the bonnet of his own car and striding impatiently across to open McCadden’s door.

‘Inspector McCadden?’ the man checked. He extended an arm for a handshake, withdrew it to perform a more correct salute just as McCadden was about to accept it, and then offered an open palm again while McCadden was gesturing acceptance of the formality.

‘Right,’ McCadden acknowledged. ‘Who do I have?’

‘Detective Garda Joseph Curtis, sir. Chief Superintendent Foran sends his apologies. He has a press conference this afternoon.’

‘Well, I wasn’t expecting the man himself.’

‘I’m to show you around. I tried to contact you to let you know, but your mobile seems to be switched off.’

‘I left it at home,’ McCadden claimed.

‘Would you like me to arrange a—?’

‘No.’

McCadden stepped from the car. He tried to keep the smile off his lips, in case Curtis misinterpreted its meaning and felt aggrieved, but he had to accept that he was already struggling here. Assigning a black officer as his liaison in a conservative rural area was a subtle opening thrust in what was obviously going to be a nasty campaign. It invited him to consider his own involvement as worthless and unwanted. At the same time, it would force him to reassess his own liberal credentials if he ever caught himself equating black with useless. It cut off any prospect of easy integration with the local detectives. And instead of easing his burdens, it added another one to the pile. It was a neat move, not least because its hidden instigators were publicly blameless. What could he accuse them of? Racism in Ireland was like the Irish sense of humour: so natural a part of normal life that it went unquestioned until it isolated you as a victim.

He wondered if Curtis was aware of any of this, but then quickly decided that the question was dangerous. Posing it would only be jumping enthusiastically into the trap that had been set for him.

McCadden moved away from the car and walked to the unprotected edge of the pier. The harbour struck him as overambitious for such an isolated spot, an impression intensified by the fact that it was totally empty. Nothing was moored there. The narrow inlet offered natural protection, but a lot of money had recently been spent fortifying and prettifying it.

‘Who paid for the restoration?’ he wondered.

Behind him, Curtis coughed to clear his throat. ‘The harbour? I don’t really know, sir. The local authority, I suppose. Mostly. Maybe with some lottery funds from central government as well.’

‘Any fishing done here?’

‘Fishing? No. There’s no fishing fleet.’

‘What’s it used for?’

‘Wealthy peoples’ yachts, mainly.’

McCadden sighed and turned. His shoulder was starting to ache a little now. The cold and dampness were seeping their way through to the wound, adding to the stiffness from the long hours behind the wheel. And he wasn’t seeing the humorous side of things any more. ‘I don’t suppose there’s anywhere I can get a cup of coffee around here?’ he risked.

Curtis shook his head. ‘You can’t get anything here, sir. There are no shops. No cafés. Not even a pub. Only a few people actually live here.’

McCadden looked forlornly past the young detective, back up the slight hill he’d descended to reach the pier. The place had the feel of an abandoned movie lot, he decided. The exteriors of the houses were variable: some neglected, some well maintained, a few carefully renovated in traditional rural style, with w. . .